Female Loneliness: May (Lucky McKee, 2002)

Welcome back! Before I unburden my lonely soul, book announcements:

Be Not Afraid, my horror comic with Lisandro Estherren, continues apace. Issue #4 – the one for people who found Issue #3 too upbeat and life-affirming – drops on Wednesday, October 1. Normally, this would be when I tell you the FOC for Issue #5, but I don't have it yet, due to a scheduling hiccup. Still, if you get your comics online, the whole series to date should drop on Comixology at the end of this month.

We are officially less than a month out from DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, which comes out October 21. Pre-order it anywhere you buy books, or swing by the Astoria Bookshop event in NYC on October 14 for forbidden early-release copies.

I am not trying to be flippant when I tell you that there were few experiences in my life more harrowing than trying to date men while looking like a straight girl. 

It’s hard to even talk about this without sounding like a transphobe. What I felt, on every date, was that I was a creature from another planet, a horrifying mess of tentacles and slime and vertical-pupiled reptilian eyeballs, and that I had to pull myself together into the shape of something small and unthreatening and accommodating and cutesy — the shape everyone agreed constituted A Girl, and particularly A Pretty Girl, A Nice Girl, the kind of Girl Boys Would Like To Date — and maintain my camouflage until dinner and/or sex had concluded, when I could go home and expand into my true, monstrous form. 

Like: Ideally you would not watch Under the Skin and think never has a movie so accurately captured the experience of being a normal cisgender heterosexual woman having healthy relationships. As far as I was concerned, that movie was a documentary. It spoke straight to my slimy xenomorphic soul. It was always only a matter of time until the mask slipped, until the flesh suit ripped; until I went from being desirable to being disgusting, and the person who used to want me decided to set me on fire. 

You can see where this starts to sound like internalized transphobia — I am portraying myself as an otherworldly monster, somehow tricking all these men into having sex with something they think is female — or misogyny, presenting femininity itself as a trick, a trap, an artifice intended to lure men in and destroy them. I don’t know if dating felt this way because I was trans, or because I am a stunning example of the neurodiversity found in nature, or (and I suspect this is a very big part of it) because the expectations put on women are dehumanizing and culturally impossible, so that every woman feels like she is only pretending to be a woman, or the kind of woman the culture wants her to be, at least some of the time. 

 What I do know is that outside of Under the Skin, it was hard to for me find any cultural vocabulary or reference point for this kind of thing. This is because I was a fool, and I waited too long to watch May.